The amazing world of LEGO® Technic constructions.
Based on the vision from Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891-1958), a carpenter from Billund/Denmark, whose personal motto was "Only the best is good enough" - Leg Godt (Play Well).

TechnicBRICKs blog (TBs hereafter) is devoted to the LEGO Technic theme and intends to spot mainly on news and developments, rather than new sets reviews or users creations (aka MOCs). However you will also find them here occasionally...

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Despite not yet available for TECHNIC models, I thought it worth to mention it here.

A couple of Engineering students from "Department of Computer Science and Engineering" at "INESC-ID/IST/Technical University of Lisbon" developed a system to create LEGO models using sketches.The LSketchIt is a calligraphic tool for creating LEGO models that uses sketches and retrieval to ease and speed up the modeling process.

The result of this work was a prototype and one paper which were presented at Annecy (France) in the "fifth Eurographics workshop on sketch-based interfaces and modeling".The prototype was based on the LeoCad system and supports ldraw files (.dat, .ldr). Regarding the user interaction with this tool calligraphic interface, it is made using sketches, mouse gestures commands and relies on a strong part retrieval algorithm.See one video demonstrating this innovative interface below, which was previously also tested by a few PLUG members.

... certainly something here that deserves further investment and additional development trying to expand its applicability into additional LEGO themes according to their specificities.IMHO, these are the kind of small advancements that makes the world move forward.

According to the authors words on the paper abstract,

"In this paper we describe a system to create LEGO® models using sketches. Although there are a few applications to create LEGO models, they are difficult to use, mainly due to the searching and manipulation mechanisms that they (do not) offer. Here, we propose a sketch based approach, where users can easily insert parts, by specifying their dimensions through sketches and the system suggests a list of possible parts. To help with the modeling and the manipulation we also developed a constraint based mechanism, which keeps parts connected, performs snap-to-grid and detects collisions. Experimental tests with users revealed that our approach is easier and faster to usethan a conventional application, such as LeoCAD."

If you have interest for reading scientific papers, you may find it here.

I'm one of the people who tested an early release, and I must confess that personally, I prefer traditional icon-based interfaces with lists of parts to choose from, instead of gesture-basted interfaces (one other example I can think of is Darwinia)... But the intelligence and technology required to translate scribbles into intelligible, interlocking bricks are indeed amazing!

But I see some rough edges are still present: when the first brick 2x2x1 is heightened, it slightly overlaps the two pieces below it.

TechnicBRICKs often shows other peoples' creations and/or images. We always try to credit the author(s) and link to their main publishing website, and if possible with their name in real life.
Since this is not always possible, we request that if you find something here that is yours or from someone you know, you leave a comment on the respective post and claim the authorship.

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